Divinity Week 10 Quest Draws

Quests are subplots that are related to but separate from the main dispute of the arc. Factions pursue them in parallel with the arc’s main objective. They are meant to give meaning to week-by-week Balance of Power standings, and to allow factions a chance to make progress on some story goals even if they don’t win the overall arc.

Rules and Mechanics

Quest draws rely primarily on Balance of Power:

Balance of Power roll. Roll dice based on the faction’s BoP standing. The format is X minus Y, e.g., d6 minus d8. The better the faction’s BoP, the more favorable the X/Y balance.

Tarot draw. Draw a tarot card. This determines the type of challenge the faction faces, and the difficulty of the challenge. (The challenge type may be Might, Vision, Influence, or BoP itself.)

If the BoP roll plus the stat, plus any other modifiers, meets or exceeds the difficulty of the challenge, the faction progresses. Else, it suffers a setback. Either way, there’s some story development.

Balance of Power

Week 10 was the week of 25 July, 26 CLE. At the time, the Balance of Power standings were:

Modifiers

Faction by Faction Updates

This is how each faction fared in the tarot card draws.

Bandle City

Bandle City continued to pursue its Might Quest. It drew the Ace of Swords, signifying a Might challenge, which it surpassed.

Bandle City’s studies of the Guardian’s Sea nexus revealed a treasure trove at the bottom of the sea: a missing Mothership module! A daring expedition to the sea floor led to a brawl with a rather frightening sea monster and the retrieval of a memory card. When the card was reverentially conveyed to the Mothership, it displayed schematics for “Zap Guns”, which fire bolts of explosive kinetic energy.

It progressed from:

Step II: “Friendship Guns”The Valoranian word ‘friendship’ is a translation of an old idiosyncratic yordle dialect-word with the sense of ‘greeting’, ‘catching’, ’embracing’, or ‘surrounding’. Those who charge yordle caravans and are met by these high-speed Friendship Guns may wish they’d studied their linguistics.

To:

Step III: “Stellar Armory”The Mothership has opened the Stellar Armory, a display of schematics for advanced “zap gun” weaponry. Strangely enough, it only ever seems to work for yordles.

Its Might Quest is now complete. It will move on to Vision.

Icathia

Icathia chose to pursue its Influence Quest, and gain greater control over the powers that be within the Institute.

Icathia drew the Strength card, symbolizing the intercession of a greater Void demon, and drew the Knight of Swords as the stat-selection card, indicating a Might challenge:

Noxus acquired much of the territory of the Shurima Desert during the Shuriman independence dispute. As the Guardian’s Sea nexus widened the conduits feeding divine and extradimensional energy into Valoran, the Xer’Sai became more aggressive, as had Renekton’s blood cults. Noxian administrators struggled to repel these threats while also (of course) seeking to topple or discredit one another.

Icathian agents cunningly inserted themselves into this mayhem, offering assistance in a series of backroom deals. The most significant example involved an influential Noxian administrator, Nalora Veltris, whose settlement just outside of Dar’Khos had attracted the attention of Rek’Sai and her Xer’Sai swarms. Her political rivals ensured she would receive no reinforcements to her worn-down garrison, and her fate seemed certain—until an Icathian envoy approached her in secret and offered to resolve her problem, in exchange for her “gratitude”. She accepted, and watched in astonishment as Rek’Sai herself was intercepted by a monstrous demonic figure bursting up from the sands. Xash’Vok, Breaker of Chains, a Void demon not seen since the First Rune War, tore Rek’Sai’s corporeal form apart and empowered the settlement’s defenders with unnatural strength, such that the weary troops easily defeated those Xer’Sai who broke through the walls. Some said that neither they nor Veltris were ever quite right again, but they survived. As Veltris’ political opponents were swiftly eliminated in a series of deeply unfortunate accidents, her power within Noxus and within the League rose dramatically—and her gratitude was, indeed, enjoyed by Icathia.

Icathia progresses from:

Step I: “Enemy of All Life”Nothing brings the nations of Valoran together like an otherworldly force hellbent on consuming the planet. Next to Icathia, the Shadow Isles seems downright friendly. The agents of Icathia skulk in darkened corridors, able to tempt only the truly desperate into deals with the likes of them.

To:

Step II: “Let Us Do You A Favor”Perhaps the eeriest thing about the deals brokered by Icathian Summoners is that they so rarely ask for anything in return. To keep their sanity, those who accept Icathian aid generally try not to think too hard about what price they might be paying.

Xash’Vok will return in the Epilogue, granting +d3 to its total.

Bilgewater

Bilgewater pursued its Vision Quest, focused on developing magical defenses to the Black Mist. It advanced from Step II to Step III through a success on a Balance of Power (Wands) check.

Archsummoner Talik Lathner, charged with coordinating the League defense of Bilgewater against the Black Mist, convinced the Council to cast a tie-breaking vote and authorize the realignment of a stagnant leyline segment along the path of Androkor’s Trajectory. This renewed thaumic motion has enabled Nagakaoborous to renew the southern winds, and the magic they carry: a natural counterbalance to the necromantic Black Mist.

This takes them from:

Step II: “Moonsilver”With the moon’s blessing, the Lunari have consecrated a coldforge, where divine smiths imbue steel with moonlight and quench it in a tranquil pool that reflects the stars above. Steel so enchanted strikes with the bright purity of moonlight, though this “moonsilver” steel lasts only until the next full moon before dissolving into cool shadows.

To:

Step III: “Divine Storm”The disappearance of the divine pantheon stilled the ethereal gale that once blew over the Blue Flame Islands, and the Black Mists have crept easily into the resulting stagnation. Nagakabouros has set the gales in motion once more, to meet the encroaching Mist with the breath of the vast ocean.

Archsummoner Talik Lathner will grant them +1 in their BoP stat-checks for the rest of the arc (i.e. their “Wands” checks), using his influence within the League to slant match outcome interpretation in their favor.

The Freljord

The Freljord had a split vote between Influence and Vision. It did Influence last week, and moved up to Step II (“Frostgems”). It did Vision this week, and once again succeeded, even on a rather difficult Major Arcana draw—Death.

After the Freljord’s Summoners discovered secrets of divine geomancy that allowed for the use of frostgems as arcane foci, frostgem mining operations dramatically expanded in scope and intensity. Miners dug deeper than before, and sites once deemed too dangerous were re-opened. Trouble soon followed. Miners began developing symptoms of thaumapsychosis, telling of eerie voices and faces, not quite human, refracted in the facets of the frostgems. Queen Ashe called on Summoners from the Institute and healers from across Valoran, but they failed to check the spread of this virulent psychic illness. She turned to Lissandra, who dispatched the Frostguard.

The Frostguard interrogated possessed miners, and soon concluded that the source of the invasive psychic energy was the chasm running through the frostgem-bearing region of the Freljord: the Howling Abyss, upon which the League had constructed a Field of Justice that should have dampened any harmful energy.

Under a full Hunter’s moon, the elite of the Frostguard went to the Howling Abyss with Lissandra herself leading them. She brought with her a parchment upon which a Summoner had recorded a strange melody that emanated from the Howling Abyss. As she sang it out, inky black shadows slid down the face of the moon until it had been completely enveloped. Shapes began to emerge from the Howling Abyss, outlined not with moonlight but with shimmers of black necromantic energy. The shapes looked past Lissandra and the Frostguard, past them and above them. As the Frostguard turned, they saw The Ghoul towering over them, his skeletal face grinning in a frozen rictus.

When the Frostguard returned to the mining camps, they laid hands on the afflicted miners and drew the sickness out from them, to the astonishment of a collection of Valoran’s most skillful and best-educated healers who had struggled vainly to vanquish the disease. The frostgems were silent from that day forward.

Those who asked the Frostguard what had transpired were answered with silent grins.

This takes them from:

Step I: “Melting Snow”The magic of the Frostguard belongs to an older age. Beyond the borders of the Freljord, it melts like spring snow.

To:

Step II: “Voices from the Abyss”Members of the Frostguard return from a pilgrimage to the Howling Abyss with strange new powers, speaking of ancient voices.

The eerie new powers wielded by the Frostguard will grant +d3 on their Epilogue event.